Red Sea Diaries

At Eagle Divers we love to share our scuba stories and latest news.

Best time to see sharks in Egypt

Want to optimize your chances of diving with Sharks in the Red Sea, read on for tips.

‘I don’t want to see a shark’, ‘I want to see a shark’, ‘when is the best time to see sharks’, ‘can you promise me sharks?’…….we hear these statements and questions a lot in our job! When you’ve never seen a shark before there is the excited anticipation of not knowing what to expect or how the shark will interact with you which can lead to some hoping to not see any whilst diving. In response to this we always tell divers that the shark is way more scared of you than you are of it, really! We’re noisy underwater, with all that expelled air and movement, sharks are not likely to hang around much more than a minute of two once they spot you, preferring instead to head back down to the deep for some peace and quiet.

But say you do want to see sharks, is there a best time to visit the Red Sea to optimize your chances? The answer to that is yes, and no. We make a point of NEVER promising a specific under water sighting as it’s a big sea out there and fish like to swim 😉 That being said, there are a couple of more popular areas where seeing sharks are more likely. Up in the North you can expect to see white tip reef shark quite frequently throughout the summer months, and surprisingly to most people local coastal dive sites often deliver the most sighting, with Ras Katy a favourite but if you’re headed out to Tiran and have the necessary qualification to go a little deeper, you may also have some luck at shark pool in Gordon Reef, that can deliver a thrilling dive with sweeping currents to add to the excitement.

A lot of guests hear about diving the back of Jackson reef to see the schooling hammerheads in the summer but this dive is very much dependant on sea conditions and also importantly, diver abilities as you’ll spend practically the whole dive deep in the blue. Unfortunately over the years the number of hammerheads spotted at this site had declined however, the total number of hammerhead sightings over the past few years have increased so we think there’s some improvement happening 😊

We do also have ‘Shark & Yolanda Reef’ and ‘Shark Observatory’, both of which you can be forgiven for thinking that’s where the sharks live based on the dive site names. That being said, during the summer months you do have a reasonable chance of seeing white and black tip reef shark here, possibly a hammerhead if you’re lucky.

We’ve been asked also if we get Tiger, Threaser and Oceanic sharks up as far as Sharm el Sheikh but these types are a lot less common than the reef shark, although all have been spotted by our dive guides over the year (again in local dive sites!), so as the saying goes, anything is possible!

If you want to optimize your chances of diving with sharks, summer months tend to be the best in the Northern Red Sea or join us on one of the Deep South liveaboards.